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Poet Naomi Shihab Nye reads her poem "Gate A-4" as part of "Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community," a project developed by the Academy of American Poets in partnership with EDSITEment, the educational website of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), during the NEH’s 50th anniversary year-long celebration.

Slave narratives are a unique American literary genre in which former slaves tell about their lives in slavery and how they acquired their freedom. Henry “Box” Brown escaped from slavery by having himself shipped in a crate (hence, the nickname “Box”) from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1849.

"Aunt Chloe" is a character created by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a 19th-century literary phenomenon who expressed her social and political views through poetry, novels, short stories, and speeches.

Did you realize the humanities understood as the study and interpretation of languages, history, literature, jurisprudence, philosophy, comparative religion, history of art, and culture along with the fine and performing arts are considered worthy of support by two federal agencies?

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Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French Algerian writer perhaps best known for novels such as The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall. As a thinker he was linked to the intellectual movements called existentialism and absurdism, although Camus himself detested both of these labels (and labels in general).

In the spring of 1849, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) faced a Russian firing squad. He had been accused of the political crime of promoting utopian socialism, a popular ideology that threatened the deeply conservative government of Czar Nicholas I.